If you sell websites and local SEO, your own site is the sample. It is reasonable for a prospective client to look at it and draw conclusions, and it would be reasonable for them to draw some unflattering ones from what ours looked like a few weeks ago.
So we ran the same audit on it that we run for clients, and this is what it found. Publishing it is slightly uncomfortable, which is a decent argument for doing so.
Finding 1: four navigation links went nowhere
The home page linked to /start, /blog, /services/seo and /ownership. None of those pages existed. Every one of them returned a 404.
This is the worst finding on the list, and not because of the SEO cost. /start was the destination of the primary call to action, referenced seven separate times on a single page. Any visitor who tried to become a customer hit a dead end.
Finding 2: no sitemap, no robots.txt, no structured data
A site selling local SEO had no XML sitemap, no robots.txt, and no LocalBusiness markup. Nothing declared where the business operated, what it sold, or that it served Chatham-Kent at all.
None of these are difficult. All three are now generated automatically from the same content the pages are built from, so they cannot drift out of date — the failure mode of a hand-maintained sitemap is that it silently stops matching the site.
Finding 3: the enquiry form captured nothing
The prototype's project planner ended in a mailto: link. It opened the visitor's email client with a pre-filled message and hoped for the best.
That fails twice. On a phone with no mail account configured, or for anyone using webmail in a browser tab, clicking the button does nothing visible at all. And because nothing is recorded server-side, you never find out it happened. A visitor completes three steps of a funnel, presses the button, sees nothing, and leaves. From the business's side, that visitor never existed.
Finding 4: the recurring services had no prices and no route to buy
Three local SEO packages, a second tier of hosting care, and several one-time add-ons were all collapsed into a single unpriced card reading 'Local SEO support when you are ready'. No price, no scope, no way to proceed.
The simplification that produced this was well intentioned and mostly correct — the first screen genuinely reads better with two clear choices than with nine. But it removed pricing for the entire recurring side of the business. A visitor ready to buy the thing that pays the bills had nowhere to go.
The fix was not to undo the simplification. It was to give 'after launch' real prices and a real page.
Finding 5: nothing to find
A single page cannot rank for much. Search engines match specific queries to specific pages, and one page — however good — can honestly compete for the brand name and one or two service-plus-place phrases. That is it.
The site had no service pages, no FAQ, no articles. A business that sells content and search visibility had published neither.
What changed
- Every linked page now exists: the planner, the SEO service page, the ownership page, an FAQ page and the article library.
- The enquiry funnel posts to a server and stores every submission, with a real confirmation page.
- Sitemap, robots and structured data are generated from the content layer automatically.
- The three SEO packages, both care tiers and every add-on carry published prices.
- An FAQ page answers the questions people actually ask before buying — including whether payment is required up front.
- The article library covers guides, local SEO, websites, worked examples and announcements.
Why publish the faults
Two reasons. The first is practical: the findings are the same ones we find on most small business sites, so the list is useful on its own merits.
The second is that a marketing business writing about transparency while quietly fixing its own broken links would be exactly the kind of thing that makes people distrust marketing businesses. The audit found real problems. They are written down. They are fixed. That is a more useful demonstration of how we work than any claim about our process.
Common questions
- How often should I audit my own website?
- A full audit once a year, and a quick check quarterly: click every navigation link, submit the contact form from a phone, and run one page through PageSpeed Insights. Most serious problems are found by those three checks.
- What is the most common small business website problem?
- A contact path that silently fails — a form that goes to an unmonitored address, a mailto: link that does nothing on mobile, or a phone number that is not tappable. It is invisible from the inside, which is exactly why it persists.
- Can I audit my own website?
- The important parts, yes. Click every link, submit every form from a phone, check for a sitemap at /sitemap.xml, run PageSpeed Insights, and verify Search Console shows no coverage errors. That covers most of what matters before anyone needs specialist tools.